RUSH: It takes me to one of the most fascinating pieces about this story that I have seen in a while. It’s Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal. And his piece is entitled, “Expect a Coverup.” The subheadline is: “Russia may have indeed affected the election, through the farcical Mr. Comey.” I’m gonna get into this excerpt by excerpt, but I want to summarize what his piece…

It took me three times reading. This is one of those columns where you could make your point in one paragraph, but the paper is expecting 750 words, so you have to write 750 words and include your primary conclusion in there somewhere. And it took me a little while to translate this and wade through all the weeds. And here is the basic assumption: that Trump actually was elected by virtue of Russian meddling in the election, but it is not the way you think.

Do you recall, ladies and gentlemen, a fake email — well, do you recall the story of an email that James Comey received that implicated Loretta Lynch? The email said that Loretta Lynch had assured everybody that she was going to tamp down the Hillary investigation. I know I have told you about this email. It has not been a primary focus of this story. It’s been given scant attention. But I have mentioned it to you two or three times.

But Mr. Holman W. Jenkins thinks the whole story is wrapped up in that email, because it turns out to be fake. It is a fake email that has been traced back to the Russians. And it fooled Comey. This email, according to Mr. Jenkins, is what made Comey do his July 5th press conference. Because the email claims that Loretta Lynch is compromised, she’s conflicted, she reportedly at the time said she was gonna fix the Hillary investigation, gonna tamp it down, she’s gonna stop it. And Comey then said to himself, “You know, she can’t go out and do this. I’ve gotta do it.”

So he took over and went out and did the July 5th press conference and basically listed all of her crimes and then said he wasn’t gonna prosecute ’cause she didn’t intend to do any of it, and then closed the case. And the only reason he did it is because he believed the email. And the email turns out to be fake. And the theory is that that press conference upended everything in the campaign, and if Comey had not been fooled — and so his point is, the establishment cannot allow that to get out. The establishment cannot let it be known that after a thorough investigation, that all of this happened because Comey screwed up. The establishment will circle the wagons and protect one of its own, which is Comey.

So he says Mueller and his investigative team cannot find the truth of this, which is Comey being fooled by a Russian fake email. So they got to find some other excuse for this, and that is the purpose of this special counsel investigation, to come up with a cover-up that explains all this without blaming or indicting James Comey and his incompetence.

Here’s the full summary that I wrote, attempting to explain this piece to myself. “Mr. Jenkins is saying that Trump actually was elected by Russian meddling in the election by creating a fake memo about Loretta Lynch that Comey fell for that 99% of the American people have never heard of or had forgotten of by Election Day. The fake memo forced Comey to do a press conference clearing Hillary Clinton, when Loretta Lynch should have been the one to do that. There should not have ever been a July 5th press conference. All of this ended up electing Trump. The establishment cannot permit this embarrassment to be cited as official, and so they have to cover this up by blaming something or someone else.”

And that’s the purpose of the investigation, to find some way out so that Comey doesn’t get blamed for this, so that the establishment doesn’t get blamed, so that Trump doesn’t get blamed, so that Putin doesn’t get blamed. This thing is such a horror of incompetent errors that the establishment is circling the wagons trying to find, while conducting this investigation, a plausible explanation for all of this, that Jenkins theorizes will actually be a cover-up of what happened. His theory. His theory that this all centers around Comey falling for a fake Russian document.

Nothing in this story about the real fake Russian document, the dossier. The dossier, the golden showers dossier that got everybody going. It got the CIA got, got the DIA going, got NSA going on, that’s not even mentioned in this column. The fake email attributed to Loretta Lynch claiming she was gonna shut down the Hillary investigation is instead cited as the fake Russian document that caused all of this havoc.

And I realize some of you, having heard me say this, are still confused, and I don’t blame you. I was confused. I read this five times. I prepared five different summaries trying to explain what this — ’cause I don’t know what he thinks the truth is even after reading this, and I don’t know what the cover-up is gonna be. All I can glean is that Mr. Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal thinks that this whole thing went south because Comey fell for a fake Russian memo and that nobody wants anybody to know that.

That would be very embarrassing for inside-the-Beltway establishment types, for a fake Russian memo to have caused all of this and, in their view, for Hillary Clinton to lose. Because what it ends up doing, it actually establishes that the Russians did meddle in the election. The problem is, they didn’t do it with Trump; they did it with Comey, and they can’t let that stand. That’s how I’m assessing this. And I think that’s pretty close to what his point is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, if this story sounds familiar to you, an email claiming that Loretta Lynch was going to basically fix and tamp down the Hillary email and server investigation, if that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve referenced it before. Back on May 24th, in fact, the Washington Post tried to get out in front of this. They thought this email was a bombshell.

“A secret document that officials say played a key role in then-FBI Director James B. Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation has long been viewed within the FBI as unreliable and possibly a fake.”

Remember? Comey believed it, but it doesn’t matter whether Comey believed it or not because he acted as though he did. He acted as though the document was real. It has been I guess as close to established as it can be that it’s a Russian fake document. The Washington Post story tries to make clear that all of the smart people at the FBI, they knew right off the bat it was fake, it was a futile Russian attempt, but Comey fell for it.

“In the midst of the 2016 presidential primary season, the FBI received what was described as a Russian intelligence document claiming a tacit understanding between the Clinton campaign and the Justice Department over the inquiry into whether she intentionally revealed classified information through her use of a private email server.”

They were gonna just basically erase the investigation. The Washington Post tried to say that the email came to them via the interception of a Russian intelligence analysis document. This has not gotten a lot of play, and the reason it hasn’t is because it’s highly embarrassing to the FBI and to Comey. James Comey apparently based his decision to do that July 5th press conference on this one document that compromised Loretta Lynch. Comey realized she couldn’t go out and announce that the Hillary investigation was over because they had this document claiming she had already assured the Hillary team that it was over.

So Comey had to take over and do it himself as though the document were true. And it was the Russians that created it. Apparently it wasn’t true. There hadn’t been any tacit assurance between Lynch and the Clinton campaign, supposedly. Anyway, Mr. Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal thinks this is what really is behind all of this that’s happened. It’s too embarrassing to get out that way.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One more thing on this. So Lindsey Graham, the U.S. senator from South Carolina, has said that the FBI Director Comey briefed the Senate about this email. Again, this email claims that this had been an arrangement between the Hillary campaign and Loretta Lynch that the investigation wouldn’t go anywhere.

So Comey believes that and then realizes that Loretta Lynch, because of this she can’t go out and do a press conference that exonerates Hillary and announces the end of the case, the closing of the case. So Comey says he’s gotta go do that, ’cause Loretta, she’s tainted by this. Nobody knows it at the time, this thing has been very hush-hush. It’s not like the golden showers dossier which been everywhere, this thing was kind of hush-hush. There’s only been one story about this in the Washington Post back on May 24th. And Lindsey Graham thinks it’s real.

Lindsey Graham thinks that this is not a fake document. He thinks that it is real. He thinks there was a bit of collusion, I guess, between the Hillary campaign and the DOJ. And Graham has, in fact, said that if Comey or the FBI thought that this was a fake document, they never told Congress that in all the times they briefed them about it.

Now, Comey briefed people in closed session on this document. That’s why there hasn’t been much in the public domain about it. Now, when you strip all of this away, let me tell you what this is really all about. Trump winning the election has sent the establishment into conniption fits, and they’re out of control. They never thought it was going to happen. They never conceived that it would happen. They never in their wildest dreams conceived that any outsider would ever have a prayer at winning the presidency. And so they never took Trump seriously all during the campaign.

They employed the usual dirty tricks strategies to get rid of him, and nothing worked. Trump survived them all. They went into Election Day thinking that Hillary was gonna win, and some people thought in a landslide. And when Trump ended up winning, I can’t describe for you the psychological and real-world impact on all these people. I’m talking, all told, millions of people, primarily in Washington, New York, Boston, the Northeastern corridor. And in that million people you have a very select few of the elites who actually run it.

They have been beside themselves ever since, and they have been in a circle-the-wagons mode protecting their thing, protecting the establishment, protecting the swamp. All of this, be it the “nothing there” Russian investigation and every ancillary, all of this is about one thing and one thing only, and that’s getting rid of this pretender, just getting rid of Trump and reclaiming control of their domain.

Mr. Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal has got a pretty good idea of what’s happening here and has realized that what really has them in a tizzy here is that the Russians may in fact have tricked, not Trump, and not Carter Page, and not Michael Flynn. The Russians may in fact have tricked James Comey and the FBI into taking action such as that July 5th press conference and then the reopening back in October, of doing things that really did damage to Hillary’s campaign.

And rather than admit that, they can’t dare admit that. They can’t admit they got buffaloed. Sure, it’s easy to say Trump was colluding or Trump was stupid and got caught, but not them. The Russians would never even try to trick them. And now that the Russians tried and succeeded, a massive circle-the-wagons cover-up is in process. And the objective is whatever they end up with, the swamp must be guarded. The swamp must not take the hit. The establishment must not get any blame for anything that has happened.

So the investigation, the theory is that the special counsel investigation is all about searching for a plausible cover story. Now, Mr. Jenkins says it’s a major effort because the cover-up cannot indict the establishment, it cannot indict Putin, and it really cannot indict Trump. They’ve got to come up with something that doesn’t indict themselves, that will explain all of this to the American people, that will justify all of this nothingness that has been going on since the election.

Now, I don’t think it’s that complicated. I think it’s been tacitly obvious that they’ve been wanting to get rid of Trump for whatever reason and however they try to do it. But the specter that Comey got fooled, that Comey was tricked. And again, it doesn’t matter if he was or wasn’t because he acted as though he believed it. So whether he got tricked or not, he still behaved as though it was real. And it caused things to happen that people in the swamp think is the reason Trump got elected. It ended up making Hillary look bad. It ended up making the Democrats look bad. It ended up making the game look rigged and so forth.

So they’re protecting Comey ’cause he’s been a loyal establishment soldier. He’s been a loyal Republican member of the establishment, meaning he’s willing to turn on his party whenever necessary. Mueller and his team have to come out of this spelling like a rose. Whatever happens here, none of the players are gonna get soiled. And Mr. Jenkins’ theory is that the effort right now is to protect the lives and the reputations of the people who live and breathe and run the establishment.

Now, maybe as the program unfolds I’ll give you a couple of paragraph excerpts from his piece, but, believe me, my summary is pretty spot on. And I say it took me five times minimum reading this thing to put all of this together. ‘Cause he could have done this in one paragraph, but he had to write 750 words. So it’s got intricately woven paragraphs and sentences. He doesn’t identify what the truth is. He doesn’t identify what is being covered up. That’s left for me to analyze, and the reader to guess, which is what I have done.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We go to Columbus in Ohio. This is Rhonda. Welcome to the program. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. I can’t believe I’m talking to Rush Limbaugh. Amazing. Anyhow, I have a question. I thought Comey had testified that he had shown that memo to Loretta Lynch and got a firm look and was told to leave the office.

RUSH: Are you asking me or are you remembering that?

CALLER: Yeah. Isn’t that what was said by him? Didn’t he testify that?

RUSH: You know, I’m not sure. I’m gonna have to think about that. I know that he testified about Lynch, when he was spreading the, shall we say the joy. His last appearance, I thought his objective was to indict members of both parties during his testimony so that he would not be accused of being one-sided in his testimony against Trump.

And he said something — it might have been that where he was troubled by something Loretta Lynch said or asked him to do. Yes. He said that Loretta Lynch asked him to not use the word “investigation” in talking about the Hillary matter, that instead she asked him to call it a “matter.” And he said he was highly troubled by this. This Washington Post story on May 24th and the column I cited in the first hour by Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal is about something entirely different.

Now, your memory may be good. He might have said at some point in connection with this, that he had asked her about this document, and all she did was stare at him and tell him to get out of her office. That may have happened. I have a vague memory of that myself. But since you brought this up, let me briefly, if you just joined us you know what this is about, so let me briefly touch on it. There’s a column in the Wall Street Journal that I found last night that either ran yesterday or runs today by Holman Jenkins.

He claims that what is going on now with the special counsel and virtually everything else is a cover-up is being manufactured in order to disguise what really happened here in terms of Russian meddling in the election. And it is his theory that the Russian meddling in the election is an email document that was sent to the FBI that said Loretta Lynch was cooperating with the Hillary campaign and was assuring the Hillary campaign that nothing would come of this investigation. It is reportedly a fake document created by the Russians that Comey believed. And that is where the embarrassment here resides.

Comey, after getting the document, realized that Loretta Lynch was compromised. She could not publicly clear Hillary Clinton. She could not announce the investigation was over because here was a document that claimed she’d already told Hillary that. So the theory is that Comey decided to take over since Loretta was tainted, and he called the July 5th press conference and listed Hillary’s crimes and then said he wasn’t gonna prosecute because no reasonable person would because they couldn’t find any intent, you know, yada yada yada, and then announced the case was closed.

And it’s the theory of the columnist in the Journal that this is the prime example of Russian meddling that did affect events that could have resulted in Trump winning the election. But it’s not Trump collusion, it’s not Trump associates collusion with the Russians; it’s the Russians bamboozling the FBI. I should say bamboozling Comey, because the story is that many in the FBI thought it was fake. Some think it’s real. Some thought it was fake. FBI did. Comey thought it was real and acted as though it was real.

And here’s a little add-on. Let’s go back to this epic 7,000-word story in the Washington Post Friday, which talked about Obama’s brave struggle to figure out how to punish the Russians for tampering in our election or to figure out how to stop it. And remember the upshot of the story was that Obama did nothing, he didn’t do a thing. He let it happen and all he did in December was expel 35 Russian diplomats.

It prints out 36 pages. On page 25 of the printed Washington Post story is the little paragraph: No evidence has ever been found prove the Russians tampered with a single vote or manipulated the count in any way, shape, manner, or form. Nothing there. But you know what is not mentioned in that 7,000-word story? You know what else is not mentioned? Let me be precise. Nowhere in the Post’s story is Obama presented with evidence or described as worried about Trump colluding with Russia.

That 7,000-word Washington Post story that prints to 36 pages is singularly focused on the Russians and what they were doing to tamper with the election. This is a very noteworthy observation. In all of those 7,000 words on the Washington Post Friday story there is not a single word. At no time in that story is Obama presented with evidence of or described as worried about Trump colluding with Russia.

Now, tell me, what has this Russia story been about since 24 hours after the election? It’s been about Trump colluding with the Russians. The Washington Post story last Friday doesn’t even mention that and it doesn’t say that Obama was warned of it. What it says was that they were made aware of this dossier, the golden showers, but that story was singularly, exclusively concerned with what the Russians were doing to tamper with our election. And that story doesn’t mention the fact, doesn’t allude to Obama being told once that Trump was working with them.

If you’re gonna write a 7,000-word expose on the Russians tampering with the election and you’re gonna do that in the middle of June, six months after the president’s been inaugurated, after a year’s coverage of Trump colluding with the Russians, how do you write a 7,000-word story and not mention that? This story had to result from all kinds of insiders leaking. Obama administration people leaked like sieves for that Washington Post story to be written.

And it’s noteworthy that at no time is Obama told Trump is colluding. All he’s told is the Russians are trying to screw with the election. At no time was any evidence presented of Trump collusion. So the theory is that the establishment, the swamp got taken, they got totally fooled by a fake Russian document, and that cannot ever become part of an official explanation for what happened.

So Mr. Jenkins theorizes that what’s happening is we should expect a cover-up, that the truth here is unacceptable to the establishment, that the special counsel represents. There is no appetite for the truth among Democrats. They cling to Comey’s legal exoneration of Mrs. Clinton. They can’t have that change. There is no appetite for the truth among Republicans, because Comey and Mueller are Republicans. They’ve been promoted in their careers by Republican presidents.

There is no appetite in the Trump White House for the truth of this to come out because the Trump White House doesn’t want its election victory tainted with news that a Russian dirty trick was involved. There’s no appetite for the truth of this story to come out in the Kremlin because Vladimir Putin knows that relations with the American superpower are slipping toward an all-out hostility that he doesn’t want and can’t afford.

“In the U.S., to acknowledge the truth would be to complete the task Russia set itself in discrediting the U.S. leadership class. A cover-up is the only way to go.”

Russia may have indeed affected the election through the farcical Mr. Comey, by bamboozling him, not by colluding with Trump. That’s the theory. And so the swamp, the establishment has got to cover up how they got taken by Putin. And they’ve been trying to lay it off on Trump, but they can’t because there isn’t any evidence Trump knew Putin, talked to Putin, colluded, or anything.

That May 24th Washington Post story which mentions that fake email about Loretta Lynch fixing the thing for Hillary is the trick. And since the swamp is the best and brightest, the truth of this can never be known, that they got tricked, that they got hoodwinked, that Russia played ’em.

So special counsel and all these Democrat hires, all these lawyers, the whole thing now is to come up with a plausible cover-up that makes this go away with nobody being indicted, charged, put in jail, or what have you. That’s his theory as to what is going on right now.

If he’s right, folks, the truth of the matter is that Trump has not a thing to do with any of this. Especially not in the way the media and the establishment have been trying to establish: that Trump colluded with the Russians to screw the election, screw Hillary. If Jenkins is right, the Russians tricked the FBI director into taking action that people think ended up being detrimental to Hillary Clinton.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Our caller Rhonda was right. I went back to the archives. We have a story; once again it’s from these great journalists, John Solomon and Sara Carter at Circa. The date of the story, June 12th. “Comey Got ‘Steely Silence’ After Confronting Loretta Lynch About Clinton’s Email Probe — During the conversation, Comey told lawmakers he confronted Lynch with a highly sensitive piece of evidence.” This is now what turns out, some say, the fake Russian document claiming that Lynch secretly assured Hillary that nothing would come of her email investigation.

Comey told lawmakers he confronted Lynch about this, “a communication between two political figures that suggested Lynch had agreed to put the kibosh on any prosecution of Clinton. Comey said ‘the attorney general looked at the document then looked up with a steely silence that lasted for some time, then asked him if he had any other business with her and if not that he should leave her office.'”

So Comey did take that document that turned out to be a Russian fake document, and ask her if it was true. “Have you told Hillary? Have you actually put the kibosh on it? Have you told her she’s not gonna be prosecuted?” And Lynch gave him a steely stare and told him to leave the office. And that’s when Comey said, “Uh-oh, the DOJ is compromised, I have to go out there and close this case.” On July 5th. That’s the timeline.